All In Your Head: Illness as Identity, Trauma as Fashion, and the Desire to be Disordered (coming 10/27/2026)
My next nonfiction book, to be published by Simon & Schuster this October. A searing account of the ways in which mental health culture distorts our understanding of mental illness, abandons the severely ill, and threatens the lives of millions who desperately need care.
With All in Your Head, I offer a long-overdue critique of modern mental health culture. I show how deinstitutionalization, a well-intended but ultimately doomed corrective to psychiatry’s early abuses, collapsed into a humanitarian disaster, leaving the severely mentally ill to cycle through homelessness, incarceration, and neglect. More recently, the “gentrification of disability” has turned mental illness into social currency, even as those with the most disabling conditions deteriorate on the streets. The digital age has only intensified this crisis, spreading implausible self-diagnoses and turning rare disorders into identity theater, while the truly ill are left out of the conversation. I call for changes both large and small to mental health policy but also to mental health culture, which is if anything even more important.
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The Mind Reels (2025)
My debut novel, published by Coffee House Press in October 2025. A young woman finds her life disintegrating as she descends into mental illness.
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Critical Praise
This début novel chronicles a young woman’s unravelling with ethnographic detachment. Alice, a middling student at a state university in Oklahoma, drifts from adolescent confusion into sleepless paranoia. Her madness seeps into the everyday: a shower caddy’s arrangement becomes proof of conspiracy, and breakdown coexists with term papers, hookups, and trips to TJ Maxx. Avoiding romance and melodrama, deBoer writes in an affectless register that mirrors Alice’s dissociation. The novel’s power lies in its relentless banality—the mind churning while life’s machinery grinds on. During a halting recovery, Alice develops “deep intuitions” about her medications, which, she suspects, interact “like hot-tempered roommates in the shabby apartment of her brain.”
— The New Yorker (Best Books of 2025)
Grapples unflinchingly with mental illness and modern alienation in a way that will captivate readers.
— Booklist (★ Starred Review)
Since David Foster Wallace’s death, the everyday reality of mental illness has rarely been captured as rigorously and without adornment as deBoer’s hard-to-shake portrait of a woman in unceasing crisis.
— Library Journal
A searing portrait of a woman on the brink.
— Publishers Weekly
The core of this compact novel is so tough and powerful — it has the verisimilitude of a case study and the dread of an existential drama.
— Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal
Immersive — slim but powerful, gripping without making any effort to manipulate the reader through a redemptive plot arc. Not an ounce of sensationalism or sentimentality.
— John Warner (Biblioracle), Chicago Tribune
A corrective to our mental health discourse — Alice’s decline is portrayed not as sexy or romantic, but with unflinching realism.
— Will Collins, The Washington Examiner
After reading this novel, readers may come away with greater sympathy for people suffering from mental illness.
— Valerie Pavilonis, The Dispatch
The prose is brilliant — precise, beautiful, and incredibly readable. Reading it is like gliding. The ability to make Alice’s experience feel important without an overly constructed plot is one of the most impressive things about the novel.
— The Amherst Student
Advance Praise
The Mind Reels is that rarest of things: a novel that is genuinely important. DeBoer delivers truths about mental illness that many of us may find both surprising and haunting. That he does this in the context of a novel that is beautifully written, character-driven and pulsing with forward momentum makes it a real artistic achievement as well as an intellectual one.
— Adelle Waldman
It names the horrible, terrifying slog of mental illness. These experiences are presented honestly — neither clinically nor indulgently.
— Neal Brennan
One of the most precise and harrowing depictions of mental illness I’ve ever read — a relentless, compassionate, and beautiful debut novel.
— Andrew Martin
How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement (2023)
Published by Simon & Schuster in September 2023. An exploration of why the post-Floyd racial justice movement failed to translate cultural energy into policy reform — and what an effective left could look like.
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Critical Praise
One of the sharpest and funniest writers on the internet. I don’t agree with everything he says, but he’s always thoughtful and he pushes me to think. I hope his new book, How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement, will be read especially by those on the left, because the left is where his heart lies and the failings of the left seem to break his heart most.
— Pamela Paul, The New York Times
DeBoer’s writing can be withering, as the best polemics often are, and few people will agree with all of his arguments. But his central point is important, whether you’re part of the political left, center or right: Calling out injustice isn’t the same as fighting it.
— David Leonhardt, The New York Times‘s “The Morning” newsletter
A nuanced look at how movements for social change can actually succeed — rather than getting bogged down by empty gestures and inertia — from one of the most thoughtful and interesting writers out there.
— The New York Post
Advance Praise
Freddie deBoer is someone I have long passionately disagreed with, but he writes like a dream, has a relentless intellect, and is always, always worth reading. Sharp, funny, brutal and able to skewer every conventional political platitude, he is particularly merciless tackling his own side.
— Andrew Sullivan
The Cult of Smart (2020)
Published by St. Martin’s Press in August 2020. Named one of Vulture‘s Top 10 Best Books of 2020. An argument that no educational reform can succeed until we abandon the belief that academic ability is the measure of human worth.
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Critical Praise
deBoer has written a book about education that is radical and undaunted in every possible way, from its politics to its tone.
— Molly Young, Vulture
Mr. deBoer’s book deserves attention for the way in which the author honestly faces one of modern liberalism’s great inanities and addresses it using only the tenets of the political left. It is an extraordinary effort.
— Barton Swaim, The Wall Street Journal
In deBoer’s plain-spoken Marxism there is much to disagree with, but it is the sort of disagreement that leads to greater clarity, and the book is a — if he would not mind me saying so — smart contribution that should shed light on what we value, and how.
— Patrick T. Brown, National Review
Provocative… this passionate plea to reconsider “what it means to be a worthwhile person” gives policymakers and educators much to think about.
— Publishers Weekly
Advance Praise
There’s a mystery at the heart of American life: Why has education — the great liberal equalizer — failed to deliver equality? In deBoer’s searing indictment of our modern meritocracy, he rightly observes that the usual explanations don’t add up — and that they crucially shift blame from a society that makes lesser intelligence a veritable death sentence onto schools, teachers, and families.
— Elizabeth Bruenig, New York Times Opinion Writer
George Orwell once wrote that among his gifts was “a power of facing unpleasant facts.” Fredrik deBoer also has that power, in spades. The first unpleasant fact he forces us to confront is: We do not all have the same level of academic ability. And the second is: Such differences do not reduce our responsibility to address the profound inequities of our educational system. This is a cogent, beautifully written, and radically challenging book. It has made me profoundly uncomfortable.
— Alan Jacobs, author of Breaking Bread with the Dead
In a moment where intellectual “independence” often functions as a personal-branding nostrum or cover for reactionary impieties, Freddie deBoer stands out as the genuine article — deliberate, wide-ranging, lionhearted, and invariably worth reading. This book is not only an important contribution to our educational debates, but an altogether discomfiting look at our fetish for meritocracy.
— Gideon Lewis-Kraus, author of A Sense of Direction